You need to reread Frankenstein. The original monster is handsome (in a way that's oddly repulsive). He's also athletic in build rather than ponderous.

"His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!-Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath: his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriences only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips."

In the book we also see him leap around mountain and arctic landscapes with superhuman agility; as opposed to the stumping steampunk body that appears in Van Helsing.

Shelly made him as a sort of superman figure and the earliest illustrations of him show him looking almost like Greek statuary or something out of a Blake drawing. Those are the most faithful representations.

In film, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is far closer to the source novel.

I get angry when I see those lovely Taschen books all covered in plastic at the bookstores because I can't flip through them.

It's odd just how much Hitchcock experience I have from watching all of his stuff on TV (like WTBS, etc and with COMMERCIALS. ick!). I think I've only ever seen Rear Window and Vertigo on an actual movie screen. I need to fix that.

Brian, have you checked out Big Man Japan? That might satisfy your Toho fix for a while until they get their act in gear.